From My Notebooks In 1976: Thailand

[Everything in these notebooks is, of course, personal, but some of what I wrote is so intimate and revealing that I was tempted to edit it out. I have resisted the temptation because the introspection that plays out inside the helmet on a solitary journey is a valuable part of the experience. My thoughts and judgements were necessarily fleeting and not what I might think today.]

From Haad Yai, Saturday June 12th

8.30 am Breakfast seems too expensive. Can’t get map. Ride out. Find myself trying to make comparisons between SE Asia and South America.

Somewhere there’s a conference to improve the world’s water supplies. Impossible. Would ruin the soft drinks industry.

And in Vancouver, Peter Shore at a housing conference criticises new building projects. Says emphasis should be on rehabilitation. Here they can’t tear the old buildings down fast enough. In Singapore one high-rise apartment every 15 minutes. Impossible to stop. What would the bright urban Chinese do without these projects to pay for their Mercedes, stereo and whisky?

Thai landscape looks cleaner than Malaya’s. My tinted goggles colour the rice paddies to look like a Singapore Airlines ad. Remember the hopelessly incongruous Western cigarette ads in Chinese coffee house – snatches of Henry Mancini orchestrations between Chinese messages on radio.

Pass through winding mountain passes. Soldiers around. Then to Trang. Stop for coffee and cakes. Previously ate a poor pineapple. The woman who sold it to me was so ashamed to take the money that she thrust another pineapple upon me. The last part of the journey was through gathering masses of those stumps of rock thrusting through the earth’s crust, with vertical walls eroded by falling water, trees and brush growing on every available ledge and from every cranny, and above all on the top so that they somehow seem crowned with green wigs. While others come to resemble each one a huge tree in a forest of giants. The road curls among these rocks in a series of ever tightening cavortings leading many drivers (in my mind’s eye at least) to a vortical doom.

I still find my handling a trifle unsteady when not under power. But nothing like what it had been earlier. Then I’d had a feeling of wobble so great that one, stopping at a junction, I was convinced my rear tyre had gone flat. The bike didn’t seem to want to go above 45 – increasing vibration and a sense of terrible strain. Later it occurred to me to check the alignment, not done when wheel was changed. The off-sides of both wheels were in line. I centered them and the effect was dramatic. There was much greater stability and the biked surged forward without protest.

I reflected on the damage that would be done to various parts by continual bad alignment, chain, both sprockets, tyres perhaps, even engine balance from the slightly outward component of tension.

As a result, arrived happily in Phuket before dark. I had carefully schooled myself against expectation knowing that particularly now my resilience was low. But I had not anticipated that I wouldn’t even be able to find Kata Beach. I had imagined an island with a ferry and so was surprised to find myself suddenly in Phuket, without even noticing the bridge. I rode the length of a drab-looking main street, hoping to spot a lucky sign with English subtitles. Nothing. Then I was at the end. A terminal roundabout. A couple of restaurants. Already I’d realised how little English is spoken.

Last night I’d battled to understand a young man in the restaurant. (He looked so much like the early Mike Molloy [an acquaintance from my newspaper days] – youth with dignity – eagerness with gravity) who wanted to tell me about something at 9 o’clock that I could go to. When it was 9, he came up and said “Now you can go. When he realised I wasn’t going it must have suddenly penetrated that I hadn’t understood a word. All my nods and grunts of encouragement hadn’t meant anything except Jimmy Carter’s self-centered desire “not to irritate.” He became all formality and distance.

In Phuket I found no-one who spoke even as well as he did. The word Kata itself, pronounced every way I could (correctly it sounds like “cutter”) left faces bright with incomprehension. Then at last somebody asked somebody and came to point me back into town with talk of “five ways” which seemed to be a roundabout. Then I found an expensive hotel with a Chinese receptionist. She did her best to dissuade me from going to Kata. “It’s a long way she said.” (It isn’t). Then she produced a map. “My hotel is here …“ For five baht.

At last I was on my way. Even so, the directions were wrong. But fortunately I asked again at the crucial crossing and got the right advice, to follow a dirt road over two brows and down to the beach hut, coffee shop.

Kata beach, in 1976

A native came to greet me. I took him to be the proprietor when he offered me a drink. I took tea. Then he turned out to be the schoolmaster Hans had sent me to. And as we talked Adrienne came past in a Datsun. So, abandoning the bike went with her and companions (son Daniel, American Carol, Australian Alice) to another beach to eat fish and stuff. Now I had to admit the beaches were very welcoming – feeling I hadn’t known since San Andres. I was less certain about the girls – particularly the American who had a pseudo-fey act and strained after impossible similes – the sky she said, rather conclusively ¬– was like Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony.

Alice, argumentative and self-assertive, drew the same attitude from me (or was it vice-versa?) But at last it became clear that we could all co-exist, mainly because Adrienne seemed to glow with equal fondness at all of us.

Am much aware that I have to recover a great deal of moral strength to continue this journey. Physically I’m poor too. Constipation and putative piles make a poor combination, and my sequences all seem dislocated. There’s still a midget swinging his tiny torch around the edge of my right eye, and that ultimate fuzziness of vision is certainly depressing and disorientating.

Monday 14th

Reading “A Thinker’s Notebook. Posthumous papers of a Buddhist Monk.” And I suddenly realise:

I DON’T BELIEVE ANYONE

How long has this been true? For a very long time – it certainly goes back to my schooldays. When and where was I betrayed, and by whom?

And it comes to me now, as the immediate next thought, that the only person I know that I would be prepared to believe is Jo. [The girl friend I left behind in France.]

This not the same as believing in someone.

I believe in Carol, for example, but only in what she is – not in what she says or does.

This leads to a clearer perception of my love of ideals and systems, then my feeling for objects and wildlife and my eagerness for experiences. Always looking for the foundation for some credibility. And myself. How much I want to believe myself.

It is notable that no successful politician ever exhibits the qualities that thinking and feeling people associate with greatness. When the word genius is used in connection with elected politicians it is always understood to refer to a special and elementary scale of values suitable for mundane achievements.

I am accustomed to hear from people who stay in one place that there is no more to be learned from travelling around the world than by scratching in one’s own backyard. They seem to ignore that the proposition would be true either way around. A chacun son gout. (i.e. travelling seems to them a waste of effort.)

In fact the first requisite is to keep up the scratching. For a limited (though long) period of time I have found that travel stimulates me to scratch, while those who stay at home and talk about it generally have very smooth backyards.

There are of course other benefits of travel which cannot be had so easily at home, offering so much more of life’s furniture and ephemera, with which to clothe and refresh one’s ideas. And to travel alone is not unlike inhabiting a moveable monastery – attachments can be few. Often as I travel and feel my isolation I wonder whether I am moving towards a life free altogether from attachments or, on the contrary, am learning to value better those things and people to whom I wish to be attached once more. To me it is like the difference between meat and vegetables.

Wisdom is of the moment. It cannot last, but quickly decays and has to be renewed. So ‘wise people’ are always being caught out in acts of folly. While wisdom comes out of the mouths of babes. The wise “wise man” knows when to retreat into doubt and ignorance. Thus ‘no man is a hero to his valet’ and no man can be a guru to his wife. And heaven help him and his children if he tries to be a guru to them.

“The futility of life and the world” The man who insists that the violin in his hand is actually a hammer will soon find the violin futile.

PHUKET 13th – 18th June

Kata

Adrienne and the beach

Half a mile of curling beach facing NW with small island at mouth of bay. Heavy vegetation on slopes, coconut palms on shore. Sea is green (shallow) and blue (deeper). Road enters at West end – two huts selling food and drink. Other huts at East end, and a generator. Fluorescent tube light and oil lamps. Water buffalo. Chickens. People moving slowly in sarongs. Fishermen along the beach at night, with torches among the rocks at the East end. Soon a prince is to build a hotel, and all will change. Now the schoolmaster rents out a bungalow, (e.g. to Hans.)

Alice: a blonde Gunilla in search of a title? Everything she says is extruded with great force, otherwise no-one will hear or believe – herself too, perhaps. Incredible, amazing, totally and completely. She and everyone else is always freaked out, spaces filled with “you know” often repeated. Good head, intelligent, greedy, ‘Jewish nose,’ square forceful jaw, neck round and pillar-like, set slightly forward on soft round shoulders. Too fat, but not obese. Australian originally, from Melbourne. ‘Ran away’ at 17, to Israel. Kibbutz, university at Jerusalem, BA in variety of subjects – major English. Now thirtyish. Worked in Hong Kong. Essalon where she met “amazing, incredible, high energy, powerful people.” [Llama Govinda, Feldenkreis, whose speciality is helping people recover disused faculties. Ruthie Allen, his disciple, etc.] Also Nepal, monasteries, courses, If any of this has planted a seed will the shoots ever emerge? Smokes heavily (so do I). Arrived at Phuket resort very debilitated. Met Adrienne and on the basis of mutual acquaintances, came to stay. Is much attached to the idea of “people chain.” One feels that without a mutual friend one has no credentials. Ours was Jane Raphael in Cape Town.

Dan: heavy, superficially benign, (21), but obsessed with his own problems – with some reason. Son by a previous marriage to an American in Louisiana but does not know his father. (Ceasarian birth perhaps – Adrienne has the scar but might be by other operation). Has few accomplishments but parlays them wildly in conversation. “Do you speak Thai?” – “YES, FLUENTLY!” Plays guitar – has never been able to keep a place in a band. – “I’ve played in a LOT of bands.” Likes buying machinery and taking it to pieces but, says Adrienne, someone else always has to put it together again. Came on very knowledgeable about Triumphs. He had one – knows the man with all the spare parts in Bangkok. Likes to talk about his problems – you can see him settling in to wallow in them – but cannot ask for help and finds it irrelevant when offered. He knows, you see. He wants to be a racing driver. Might kill himself at that, or some other way. Hope not. There’s a good man inside. His recent hernia operation is useful to him also. He used to lift cars with one hand. Paralysed.

Karen: Whatever is inside there she’s determined to hide it for forever. Make-up, blank eyes, frizzed hair, head band, clothes, gestures. She hangs tight and loses her balance constantly. Has learned to play and sing with a guitar – like a machine. She is a permanent disturbance, like generator – but produces no light.

Adrienne: Is French, from (somewhere) near Nancy. First to Louisiana where she met Paul, a Swiss who joined the US Air Force, flew planes, crashed one, and was grounded. Studied in the South on a GI Bill, later went into advertising in Thailand (Nestlé). Over ambitious, ulcers, eventually changed to hand-crafted jewellery exporting. Both embraced Buddhism. She pursues her knowledge and development on a daily basis, and has achieved much calm, enough to maintain tranquility for all these dissonant elements in her house. She likes to draw meaning and morals from life but can also stop talking. Often hums a few bars of something to displace the energy.